


Tail Tales

by Narkito



Series: It popped in my inbox: Prompts [2]
Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Dog fic, Fluff, M/M, established relatioship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-16
Updated: 2017-06-16
Packaged: 2018-11-14 17:57:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11213265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Narkito/pseuds/Narkito
Summary: Steve has no idea how to shop for a dog. Danny obviously needs to help him.





	Tail Tales

**Author's Note:**

> For [pirate-rino](http://pirate-rhino.tumblr.com/)'s prompt on tumblr, after I asked for help dodging writer's block. 
> 
> As usual, [Ilmare_Ilse](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Ilmare_Ilse/) was my first intrepid reader and pointed out a few confusing sentences, but then I refused her beta-reader kindness because I wanted to post it soon (before I started adding more scenes), so all mistakes are mine, but feel free to point something out if it is too jarring.

Steve opens the door on his way out, going over the list of must-haves he just reread a minute before, and almost bumps into Danny on his way to letting himself in.

“What are you doing here, Danno?” He asks, leaning against the door frame, glad to see Danny so shortly after work.

Danny lowers his hand and grins up to him, crossing his arms over his chest.

“So? What are you up to?” Steve prompts, trying to figure out if his plans are about to be derailed (which he really hopes they won’t).

“What am I—I came here to help you that's what.” Danny sounds irrevocably fond. He likes that.

“Oh, yeah?” He asks, even though he already has an inkling of what’s going on. “Help me with what exactly?”

“Ah. _Hello._ Earth to Steven? What do you think?” Steve gives him a long-suffering look of utter (fake) ignorance. A plea to be put out of his misery soon. “You see, I love this about you. You think you're so stealth about everything –and yes, you could get the drop on me anytime of the day you want, and I wouldn't see you coming, you little ninja shadow SEAL, but… but,” Danny raises a finger, “some other stuff, you're transparent, babe, like a newly cleaned glass. And I love it.” He smiles to Steve, and he smiles back, enjoying Danny’s little rant, admiring the way his arms flex as he sways from side to side on his front door.  

“I saw you checking this dog website and the pet stand at the supermarket –which, by the way, don't get anything there, I'll take you to this little family shop that’s just perfect, just remind me—so… I'm here to help you find the puppy you deserve, babe.”

“Oh, Danny,” he smiles a little helplessly. Fondness tingling in his heart. “And what sort of dog you think I deserve?”

“Well, buddy, how about one that wakes you up at five in the morning and chews through your favourite combat boots. Preferably one that pisses all over your carpets and sheds all over your clothes. But I'm not really picky, any of these traits will do.”

 _Oh boy_.

 

***

 

“How about this one?” Steve's crouching in front of a mix of a Rottweiler with… something else that makes him floppy eared and shorter than usual.

Danny gives him a critical eye and quickly dismisses him.

“Nah, not the right energy for you.”

Steve frowns and turns his head in Danny's direction, giving him the stink eye, this is the fifth dog Danny has vetoed and they're running out of options here. Danny, however, has already moved on to the next cage.

“Remind me of what the right energy is, again?” He asks, annoyed.

“I'll know it when I see it,” Danny answers as he studies another dog.

“And what does it _look_ like?” He mutters more to himself than his partner, rethinking his agreement to letting Danny tag along. There was nothing wrong with the Rottweiler, just like there was nothing wrong with the German Shepherd mix nor the Lab mix. At this pace, he'll settle for a bushy-tailed Doberman, if he gets to pick his own damned dog at all that is.

“ _Aha!_ ” Danny exclaims from the last cage in the hall. “We've got a winner. This, Steve, this the one, I can feel it in my bones.”

Danny goes to him and hauls him to his feet, practically dragging him to the puppy he was just looking at.  

 _This better be good_ , he thinks, approaching the cage.

He expects to see a multi breed mix like the one Danny co-opted for Grace during the ICE agent’s case. It was a good-looking dog; strong, sturdy paws, nice set of determination around it's jaw, even if a little too quick to go from vigilant to friendly. That was a good dog, he can see himself driving around with a dog like that in his truck, he thinks.

This is not what he finds sprawled in a four-paw-spread in the cage. What he sees is probably the most miserable-looking dog he has ever seen. It looks bored out of his mind, and too damned bummed to do anything about it.

“Hey, girl, how you doing there, feel like springing from this joint?” Danny asks the dog in an overtly excited tone.

The dog is, per the information on the cage door, a Beagle mix, and about eleven months of age, which is worrying, because a puppy should be wandering around like a fluffy ball of energy, not draped on the floor like a cumbersome sprawl of lethargy. It also says she’ll be destroyed in a week’s time if she’s not adopted by then.

She shifts her eyes into Danny’s direction, huffs a breath and turns her snout the other way. A rejection if he ever saw one. But her tail stirs to life, its white tip flopping against the ground.

“Aww, chucks, don't be like that, baby girl, Steve here will take good care of you,” Danny hugs Steve to his side, “he'll take you to the beach and hiking. He'll also do embarrassing things like obsessing over your feeding habits. He’ll care for you, I promise.”

The puppy’s ears move and her huge brown eyes fixate on Steve, measuring him up. He can’t help himself and open the cage, taking a quick step into her direction, not really expecting the dog to jump to her feet and run towards him. Before he’s done kneeling she throws herself into his arms and licks his face up to his eyebrows, doing a whiny sort of sound that brakes Steve’s heart in half.

“You see? Told you he was a good one.”

Yeah, he’s definitely taking her home.

 

***

 

“How about… Linda?”

The dog whines and hides her face behind her paws.

“You tell him, girl,” Danny says from inside his fridge, he’s been rummaging around for about a minute. Steve figures some of his food’s already been consumed in secret, but he was promised dinner, so he’ll put up with it.

“Marley! How about Marley? Huh? You could be a Marley.”

Danny snorts as he closes the refrigerator with his foot, his arms full of vegetables and a chunk of cheese he doesn’t remember buying. He intuits a veggie lasagne coming his way. _Yum!_

“She’s not feeling it, buddy, try a different one.”

He racks his brain for more ideas.

“Sierra… Echo…” No answer. “Charlie…. Well, no, you can’t be Charlie, we already have a Charlie,” he amends, sparing a quick look to Danny, just in case he’s managed to offend him. He hasn’t.

“How about Roxy?” Danny says without taking his eyes off the beets he’s washing.

The dog whines again, bumping her nose into Steve’s hand, signalling for him to resume his scratching and petting.

“Okay, okay, I’ll do it,” he starts a full scratch job with both hands on her neck and ears. “I’m running out of ideas here. Stryker? Rocket? How about Private?”

“Noooo!” Danny swirls into his direction, knife in hand, “don’t you dare give her a war name, she’s a fine civilian dog, Steven, you need to name her something classic and civilised, like Ruby or Riley—

The dog barks, her ears perking up. Her tail points straight to the ceiling.

“Riley?” Steve asks, and the dog barks again— _Riley_ barks again.

“Huh,” Danny says around a smile, “guess that’s settled then.”

 

***

 

Riley stares at him with her sad puppy eyes and he almost finds himself unable to close the door on her, but the alternative is to let her run amok the house during the night, and it’s just unacceptable, he doesn’t want to find piles of crap (literally) littering his wooden floors by the time he gets up in the morning.

 _‘You sure about that, buddy?’_ He can practically hear it in Danny’s voice. It doesn’t quite help Danny’s spending the night with him, nor that he made a disbelieving sound towards him before declaring it was his bed time and ‘I’ll see you upstairs, you Satan.”

 

***

 

It’s about three thirty. There’s a chill in the air. And he can’t fall asleep. Well, he can doze off for about twenty to forty minutes, but invariably he wakes up thinking about Riley. In the kitchen. All alone. After spending a month in the pound not being adopted. And spending her days in three different homes before that, places where it just ‘didn’t work out’. The girl on the counter had told them a sob story about Riley being deemed ‘hard to place’ on account or her vast amounts of energy and tendency to wreak havoc on her path. Which is why he needs to set clear set boundaries from the beginning, make sure it’s going to work, that she won’t end up back at the pound to be destroyed. He turns to his side and closes his eyes again, determined to fall asleep and stay asleep for at least five hours.

 

***

At four fifteen he calls it quits, pads barefooted downstairs and heaves out a weary sigh at the sight of Riley sleeping rough behind the kitchen door instead of her soft (expensive) bed on a corner of the mudroom, where he made sure there was a dish of water available along with as many soft blankets as he had managed to unearth.

She sleeps on her side, and just as he’s about to convince himself he should go back to bed, her paws begin to move and her head shifts on the floor, her mouth pursing forward and doing a sucking sound with her tongue partially out.

She’s breastfeeding on her dreams, he realises, and that’s it. That does it. He pads to the mudroom, picks up her bed and then strides back into the kitchen and picks her up too. Riley barely opens her eyes and then burrows to his side, seeking the heat of his body and pushing her wet cold nose into his ribs. Poor thing is chilled to the bone.

He sets Riley up by his side of the bed, on the corner between his night table and the wall, under a thick blanket and just enough space for her to keep her head and front paws out. He figures she’ll get on top of the blanket once she’s warm enough. Last look he gives her before tucking himself back into bed, reveals her to still be lost to her dreams.

“Knew you’d com’ ‘round,” Danny mumbles to his cheek, and then throws an arm and a leg over him, going back to the deep sleep he came from. He arranges Danny’s limbs to a more comfortable position, drops a kiss to his hair and closes his eyes. It’s a lot easier to fall asleep this time.

 

***

 

He wakes up with a paw in his mouth. An actual, honest-to-god dog paw pressing down on his lips. It smells sleepy and earthy.

He sneezes. And the Beagle the paw belongs to, jumps straight up, all paws extended in the most cartoonish leap he’s ever seen, and then throws a shrieking sound that’s half a bark and half a banshee scream.

Danny’s head comes out from the bathroom, his hair a mess of sleep-tangled curls.

“Ah, you guys are up, good,” he says, and disappears again.

Riley tilts her head in Danny’s direction and then turns to look at Steve, her face lighting up in recognition.

“It’s just this once, you can’t sleep on the bed all the time.”

Danny’s laugh gets drowned by the shower once he turns the water on.

 

***

 

“Go find the man, go on, girl, go find the man.”

Riley’s paws scritch-scritch-scritch as she rounds the corner to the hall and then tramples her way downstairs and to the front door. Steve following lazily behind.

“Hey, Riley-Riley. How’s my girl? Huh? How’s my girl? You chewed on his boots yet? Come here, Riley-Riley-Riley.”

As he comes down the stairs, he can appreciate the view of Danny crouching in front of Riley, scratching her belly up to her neck and back. She’s on her back and enjoying every second of it.

He steps up to them and says, “I thought I told you to get the man, girl?”

Riley merely rounds her eyes to the point of emotional manipulation and does a whinny sort of sound from the back of her throat that never fails to make his heart soar.

“Never,” Danny says in his mock-serious voice, “and I mean this, never _ever_ listen to this man here, you do you, Riley, you hear me? You do you.”

 

***

 

There’s ringing in his ears and the feel of absolute dread washing over him in waves, he chokes on his own sobs until a wet warm tongue makes contact with his forehead, and pushes him off his train of doom-thought (as Danny calls it). The licking is making his hair stand in little spikes at the sides, blurring the tears with Riley’s drool.

“I’m fine, girl, I’m fine. It was just a dream. I’m fine.”

Riley sits down on her hind legs and gives him a long soul searching look. She barks. Once. Short and to the point.

“I swear I’m fine.”

She questions him one more time with her eyes and then curls on his lap, planting her head to his chest and looking up to him.

“Okay, okay. I’m not fine… but I’ll be soon, I swear.” He hugs her to his chest. “I’m sorry I scared you. Just don’t tell Danny, okay?”

Riley whines up to him. Obviously disagreeing.

 

***

 

The final tally is two pair of boots, all the legs of a chair, a bunch of socks, half his boxers, a few of Danny’s t-shirts, a book he doesn’t remember buying and a throw pillow he won’t mourn about because he didn’t really like it very much.

That’s how he discovers Riley can now, through determination and sheer brilliance, open the door to the bedroom.

Danny’s going to laugh him out of his house when he tells him.

Riley tilts her head, expecting him to pass judgement, or more likely to take her out for a run.

“Okay, now this, this we won’t tell him. For sure, you hear me?”

On the weekend, when Danny comes around, first thing Riley does is dig up a toeless sock from between the couch cushions and then lead Danny straight to the place in the garage where Steve hid the chair, until he could take a proper look to it and decide if he could fix it on his own or not.

Danny kneels besides her and scratches her fur. “Good girl.”

 

***

 

“I only have natural popcorn, hope that’s okay—” he cuts himself off, noticing upon entering the living room that Danny’s asleep and Riley’s well on her way to dreamland too, curled up next to him and doing little puffing noises.

He lowers the volume of the TV and sits next to them, finding a way to hold them both next to his heart, where they belong.


End file.
